Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction | Episode 33

Stop looking for your passion, and instead look around right where you are. Stop distracting yourself. Look around right where you are, and see what needs to be done.

If we expose ourselves, chronically, to substances or behaviors that repeatedly release large amounts of dopamine in our brain's reward pathway, we can change our tonic baseline and actually lower it over time as our brain tries to compensate for all that dopamine, which is more, really, than we were designed to experience.

The truth is we're all wired for addiction, and if you're not addicted yet, it's just right around the corner.

The first message I would want to get across about social media is that it really is a drug, and it's engineered to be a drug ... We need to be very thoughtful about the way we use it—just like we need to be thoughtful about the way we use any drug.

What we now conceptualize in our current ecosystem as mental illness are actually traits that, in another ecosystem, might be very advantageous; they're just not advantageous right now because of the world that we live in.

One of the most significant findings in neuroscience in the last 75 years is that pleasure and pain are co-located, which means the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like a balance. So, when we feel pleasure, our balance tips one way; when we feel pain, it tips in the opposite direction.

30 days is, in my clinical experience, the average amount of time it takes for the brain to reset reward pathways—for dopamine transmission to regenerate itself.

There is evidence that shows that people who are depressed may indeed have lower tonic levels of dopamine.

A lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction. They're unhappy not necessarily because there's something wrong with their brain but because their brain is not suited to this world.

Once you've been addicted to a substance, severely addicted, that makes you more vulnerable to addiction to any substance.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, and neurotransmitters are those molecules that bridge the gap between two neurons. So, they essentially allow one neuron, the presynaptic neuron, to communicate with the postsynaptic neuron.

When we tell the truth, we actually potentially strengthen our prefrontal cortical circuits and their connections to our limbic brain and our reward brain. And of course, these are the circuits that get disconnected when we're in our addiction.